Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Why I buy Vanity Fair and who is Annie Leibovitz

You seen her where Yoko Ono and John Lenon dons the cover of the magazine rolling stone in the dawn of the 80s and still permeate our visual contemporary culture to this day, you might have also seen her where Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes embracing their new born baby girl Suri ,which I personally will admit to have scour the internet to satisfy my curiosity, or maybe it was that risque photo where Keira Knightly, Scarlett Johansson, and a fully dressed Tom Ford is spread amongst lushly looking black velvet, and maybe it was that recent controversial "naked" portrait of Miley Cyrus that garnered your attention more.

However you look at it these photographic pieces of Americana was done by a very tasteful Annie Leibovitz, if not a spendthrift one at that. (googling her will tell you why) Her portraits of our ever fascination of celebrity and social who's who satisfies our thoughts if not curiousities, her image of them is stark, often capturing the spirit if not the essence of the subject, it has the power of hindsight to know what the audience wants and frankly they dont disappoint one bit.

So never mind the awards, and accolades, the scandals and what not, and never mind your empty walls you wish you had put something up, and never mind that most of us cant even afford her, I'm paying a visit to my local ubiquitous Indian back issue news stands and I'm getting as much vanity fair magazines as I can possibly scour and hopefully one day have the audacity to frame it up together with my other more personal photos. Till then it's the most accesible prints of Annie Leibovitz's works I can think of.

I also find that if you prefer less fashion oriented and more social political content in American fashion magazines, Vanity Fair will be most suitable as is Esquire magazines. Also as a last note, I might add that Annie Leibovitz's serves as only a contributing photographer and not all issues of vanity fair magazines contains her works, but you can almost be certain that any famous and important figure in American society will have the higher chances of being covered by her.